WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 5. JDBC

JDBC is the standard API for accessing relational databases in the Java platform. It provides a vendor-neutral abstraction for accessing databases. The JDBC interfaces are implemented for every major database, and these implementations are distributed as third-party drivers. The JDBC specification has evolved over time to support many features, including batched execution of SQL commands, statement caching, connection pooling, transactions, and disconnected rowsets. The current release, JDBC 3.0, is included in your JDK 1.4 distribution. The JDBC API provides a standard way for Java applications to interact with a relational database. It includes the following two packages:

java.sql

This package contains the Java classes and interfaces that let you connect to a database, run SQL commands, insert and update rows, retrieve results, and access database metadata.

javax.sql

This package contains the Java classes and interfaces that allow you to utilize the data source abstractions, pooled connections, distributed transactions, and rowsets.

WebLogic offers a number of services that use the JDBC, including container-managed entity beans, persistent messages, durable topic subscriptions, and JDBC-based HTTP session-state replication.

This chapter focuses on WebLogic’s support for JDBC. We look at the various JDBC drivers that are compatible with WebLogic. We examine how WebLogic lets you configure and monitor a connection pool, or a pool of reusable connections to the database. ...